Writings, opinion and maybe a few rants

Editorial

April 09, 2018

The 2018 Red Sox are an embarrassment of riches. They have the highest payroll in all of baseball, $232 million, they generate almost $500 million in annual revenue, and they are worth about $3 billion. No surprise then, that on the field the team is an embarrassment of redundancies, nowhere more glaring than the pitching staff, which once again features four left-handed starting pitchers.

General Manager Dave Dombrowski spent another offseason spending like a sailor, and unfortunately thinking like one too. He signed yet another redundant star player, right fielder J.D. Martinez, to an enormous contract, $25 million per year, but there’s not even an everyday position for Martinez in the lineup! Mookie Betts plays in right field, and Hanley Ramirez, at $20 million per year is the designated hitter.

This follows last year’s star acquisition, Chris Sale, a left-handed power pitcher redundant to the previous year’s $217 million signing of a left-handed power pitcher, David Price.

They are built for regular season ratings, not the October playoffs, where they will surely get plastered by the right-handed power hitting lineups of the Houston Astros and New York Yankees.

The Red Sox are desperate for attention, and unfairly so. Despite two recent first place finishes and three World Series titles, which broke an 86-year curse, the Sox are struggling for relevance among spoiled Boston sports fans who seem more interested in the winning ways and drama of the Patriots, Celtics and Bruins.

As they say, these are first-world problems. Nonetheless, the Red Sox fired their manager last year, John Farrell, and hired Alex Cora to make their 2018 brand of baseball more fun! They have also embarked on a public relations campaign that hints at a new and more serious threat that may also be coming to Boston soon. Amazon Prime TV, and it’s HQ #2.

The 2018 Red Sox marketing campaign is out and features their new players, but the advertising is trying to convince viewers that the Red Sox can compete with Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu TV shows, not the New York Yankees!

The promotional spots seen frequently on NESN sell viewers on the attributes of the Red Sox as a television series. On every night. Filled with drama. Filled with laughter. Good guys. Bad guys. Characters. One hundred sixty-two episodes. There’s something for everyone. “Feed Your Need” is the promo line used to ward off the daunting competition the Red Sox face from too many other TV shows.

Baseball is a big commitment, with games that last three hours almost every night, for seven months, including the playoffs. It requires attention and devotion that people don’t have in the Age of Smartphones. Every year it gets tougher to draw an audience from a general population afflicted with so much ADHD.

But what more can the Red Sox do? They had the best record in the Grapefruit League, they spend like sailors, and they are even willing to change the street name of their home address, from Yawkey Way to Jersey Street, to allay the concerns of just a few of their fans.

If Amazon chooses Boston for its second headquarters, the city will be flooded with 50,000 of its redundancy-seeking engineers. Would they one day have Dave Dombrowski and Fenway Park in their sights?

The Red Sox improbably gather almost 35,000 people per game, for 81 home games, despite being the most expensive ballpark in baseball. It costs a family of four on average almost $400 for one night of the baseball experience. Yet a family of four can subscribe to Netflix for $13.99 a month, and Amazon TV is free with Prime. That’s tough to compete with.

Fans of Red Sox TV programming, though — unlike those of shows on Amazon and Netflix — can come to Fenway Park, where the series is shot and produced, and see Boston’s star players in person, possibly getting their autograph. You can’t say that about “The Crown.”

February 16, 2018

It may have cost the Patriots a sixth ring, and broken the hearts of their fans, but it was a necessary gamble made to keep in-check the future salary demands of the rest of the team, and was consistent with Belichick’s brutal, clear-eyed fiscal management of his players over the years.

Belichick tried to make an example of Butler. That they could win the Super Bowl without him.

The Patriot Way is not so much the X’s and O’s of their playbook anymore, but rather debits and credits on an incredibly complex financial ledger sheet, a payroll book, which Bill Belichick alone manages.

Malcolm Butler wanted to get paid, and was not shy about it. Like many of his teammates, this was his third Super Bowl in four years. He was an unheralded, undrafted player that Belichick coached into the penultimate play of Super Bowl 49, and both the fans and Patriots owner Robert Kraft loved him. Butler’s interception at the goal line was the best thing to ever happen in his Patriots career. But from that moment on, in Belichick’s eyes, Butler and his agent overvalued his worth to the team, and would not play for a salary commensurate to The Belichick Way.

Established, talented, popular football players are hard to move on from, but Belichick has been famously doing so for almost two decades. The one constant has been a willingness to move on from star players for the greater financial good of the team.

The Patriots spend about the same amount of money on salaries as the Red Sox do — $170 million — and both leagues operate under a salary cap, but Belichick has to spread that money around to about 120 players over the course of the season, compared with around 40 players over at Fenway Park. Even Tom Brady, supposedly the greatest quarterback ever, only made 8 percent of the total 2017 budget for Patriots salaries.

Belichick is tight-lipped at a press conference, excruciatingly so. Praise from Belichick equals money in a player’s contract, so he is careful with what he says.

Yet now he going to “open his world” to the heir apparent coach, Josh McDaniels, and school him on salary cap management.

Belichick is being forced to share his salary cap secrets with McDaniels, because of a breakdown in The Belichick Way that was outlined in an explosive ESPN article last month about tensions with Brady, Belichick and Kraft. It all came to a painful halt for Belichick this year, when he wanted to move on from the greatest player the Patriots have ever known. Tom Brady. When applied to their star quarterback, The Belichick Way was evidently too much for the Krafts, and they blocked Belichick’s plans to move on from Brady and play Jimmy Garoppolo.

Did having his methods questioned get to Belichick?

In the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, the Patriots were leading the Eagles 33-32. The Patriots needed Butler on the field in Minneapolis. At $3.9 million per year, Butler was the 11th highest paid player on Belichick’s active roster of 52 Patriots. Put another way, he was the 11th most important player on a team of 52.

Malcolm Butler didn’t play one snap on defense. He sat on the bench humiliated, an example to all of the other Patriots looking to cash in after the Super Bowl.

April 16, 2016

The Red Sox, who open their regular season tomorrow, are desperate, in a Make America Great Again kind of way. Their political hats should read At Any Price, following the absurd off-season signing of a 30-year-old pitcher to a contract that pays $31 million per year, for seven years. Meet the new $217 million albatross, David Price, same as the old albatross: Pablo Sandoval, Hanley Ramirez, Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez…

Red Sox ownership, apparently unwise in old age, mirrors the impatient and now toxic Republican Party. Make the Red Sox great again! So last August, they fired their excellent, analytical general manager, Ben Cherington — the last real link to former General Manager Theo Epstein — and tore up the team’s best practices guidelines, with quaint concerns for organizational process and ideals. The playoffs will justify the means.

What a shame. Boston had the top-rated farm system in all of baseball, but like the Republicans under Obama, the Red Sox are poor losers, and couldn’t wait it out like Epstein (who, as president of the increasingly successful Chicago Cubs, is gaining on them) to develop their younger players. Instead, they brought in a finger-pointing dealmaker, David Dombrowski, to be the new president and general manager, and accelerate the Frankenstein team-building worst practices. Free-agent spackled rosters are nothing new, but of the 30 players now on the Red Sox roster, David Price makes more than two-thirds of them combined. Talk about income inequality!

This past summer, No. 1 Cubs fan and actor Bill Murray, on Martha’s Vineyard, lamented that Red Sox Nation used to be “gracious as losers, but are now unbearable as winners." Comedians tell the truth. The same could be said for the Republicans and their presumptive nominee, Donald Trump.

Politicians, and good leaders of all types, build consensus and have success by patiently doing the right thing. We don’t need to win the World Series every year to enjoy life as Red Sox fans, and we don’t need to win every economic trade deal to enjoy life as Americans. Some things take time to develop. Ask any gardener. Ask any parent. Some years you do things that won’t bear fruit for a while. It’s okay.

For the good of the team and the game it’s understandable to have a few down years, while the young players develop. Same thing goes for the U.S. of A. The economy is pretty good. Complicated, but good.

Yet here we are seemingly ready to go over the falls with Trump as Republican candidate for president, and then what would be the unthinkable for many, President Trump. As strong as the country is from the bottom up, a rotten top may make a world champion fragile beyond belief.

The Red Sox ownership are all in, at any Price, but it's a narrow unsustainable path. The obscene salary for David Price will corrupt the team on the field, and be a burden for the organization off the field in the years to come. The mentality for winning at David's price is bad for Red Sox Nation, and not just the sad sight of ordinary fans paying millions of their hard-earned dollars to bring young families to Fenway Park. Too much money and greed changes the equation, and expectations. We're at a tipping point between being curious and unbearable.

A game at Fenway Park last year was still a beautiful experience, despite the outcome on the field. The sky was blue, the stadium green and snug for all the incredible sights and sounds of baseball. Don't take that away from us. Winning wasn't the only thing.

April 16, 2015

The most important player of the Boston Red Sox Epoch that has produced three World Series Championships is David Ortiz, a man from the Dominican Republic who speaks English as a second language, and grew up surrounded by Third World Caribbean poverty, eating mofungo (a fried plantain-based dish).

Now in the twilight of his playing career, Ortiz is the one still standing. Long gone and burned out by money and ego are Johnny Damon, Curt Schilling, Terry Francona, Manny Ramirez, Jonathan Papelbon, Theo Epstein, Jon Lester and many others.

"Big Papi" is more than the face of the franchise. In the land of Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Updike, he became the voice and conscience of the Red Sox. The de facto spokesman. With broken English, he has bested the most literate, articulate and insufferable sports journalists in the country. He survived the Boston press corps, and his own all-too-human missteps, to become the embodiment of what the team wants to be going forward in the future.

The Big Papi blueprint is a secret-sauce combination of Latin talent, humility and blissful ignorance of a very particular New England English language scrutiny. What’s that you say, bro? Yes, they make millions of dollars, but from Ted Williams to Carl Yastrzemski to Nomar Garciaparra they have all wilted in the unbearable fishbowl of Fenway Park.

Even still, Ortiz has had to fight off — or is it ignore? -- the derision of many this spring who say that he will never get into the Hall of Fame despite all the home runs, clutch hits, championships and kind words. But he will. The rules are different for Big Papi, and for good reason. He’s come farther. He speaks from the heart. We know what he means. Perhaps most importantly, he lets it all roll off his back so he’s loose at the plate and on the field when it counts.

Red Sox Nation will soon have more Spanish-speaking fans then they do English-speaking fans. On Opening Day 2015, half of the Medias Rojas roster was born outside the Continental United States, and speak English as a second language.

Red Sox beisbol is still America’s game in the sense that it reflects the engagement of the United States in all economic hemispheres of the globe. For the Red Sox, success breeds Spanish-speaking fans and Japanese-speaking fans, in addition to obnoxious English-yelling fans!

Red Sox ownership of a once provincial and proud Boston baseball team has grown with Ortiz to become one of the premier international sports businesses in the world, the multi-billion dollar Fenway Sports Group, with interests in European soccer, a professional NASCAR racing team and connected media properties.

At the nadir of the murderous Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, it was Big Papi who spoke for the city, in broken English. The profanity was perfect. We knew what he meant. His confidence and success, along with that of the Patriots, Celtics, Bruins and many significant businesses in New England, have culminated in a renaissance of Boston, and a step further onto the world’s stage to try to host the Summer Olympics in 2024.

So far, in the 21st century, Boston is the American City of Champions, with nine titles including the most recent Super Bowl, radiating out to all corners of the world. There are many heroes, both on the field and off.

If the Olympic torch ever makes it down Widett Circle to a Boston Olympic Stadium, David, middle name Americo, Ortiz can surely carry it.

March 31, 2014

The city of Boston and New England sports fandom stand at the top of the mountain. After years of heartbreaking futility, and a reputation as the smartest losers in the room, fans of the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics and Bruins can now see their teams and city on the Mount Rushmore of American Sports.

Beantown is Title town. There have been eight championships in the last 13 years. New York has had just three, and they have twice as many teams! No other city is close.

But New Englanders are not dancing down the aisles, or acting any wiser, or kinder. Unfortunately, success has gone to the head of Boston sports fans, and the sports journalists who wag the tail of Red Sox Nation. Emboldened, they continue on in their never-ending quest to wring withering critical analysis out of every minute of every sports day. Decades of New England sports journalism — the best in the country — somehow blossomed into a big bad miserable media business of provoking point/counterpoint arguments over every excruciating detail in and around Fenway Park, Gillette Stadium and the Boston Garden.

Red Sox Nation will eat its young, but next up they are going to take down the most well-known and beloved elder of the team, Jerry Remy. Mobs behave like this. Egyptian mobs!

Jerry Remy, president of Red Sox Nation, former Sox second baseman, restaurateur, 26-year color announcer for NESN and fellow cranky New Englander, is not safe. Nothing and no one is off-limits. The media and sports fans have begun the process. The stories are out on the front page of The Boston Globe and on the radio. Remy enabled his allegedly murderous son Jared. Like the financial markets, natural selection or talk radio, the onslaught is not personal, it’s just business.

The business of sports journalism in Greater Boston and the resulting fan mob behavior does not have a heart.

The Red Sox had a season last year that few in the local media saw coming, but up until Game 6 of the World Series, radio yakkers like Michael Felger and Tony Massarotti were plying their business of “solid negativity,” criticizing Sox management and players at every juncture. This kind of insufferable oversight by the sports press and fan addicts perpetuates itself. They are in the business of being unhappy. I know the winters are long, but is unhappiness what it means to be a true New Englander?

So here come the April fools, and on Opening Day, they will be ready to tear it all down again. Not older and wiser. Not the long view. Not like they’ve been there before.

No. Instead, WEEI and the Kirk Minihanes of the sports world will make plausible arguments against Remy. Once the fire starts the flames take on a life of their own to burn down yet another honorable part of Boston’s sports scene.

In this town, winning breeds winning at any cost, and this city wants more. Soon, the Rem Dog will be saying “Buenas noches,” Boston, for good.

April 01, 2013

The Red Sox have always had high-minded scrutiny. Every year the bleachers get filled with a new litter of Harvard and MIT students. The best sports journalism in America continues to come out of Boston and Providence, where young seamheads follow familiar paths from Boston College, Brown University and other local schools to The Boston Globe, The Providence Journal and many other sports media outlets. Recently, yet another beat writer from The Globe, Greg Bedard, ascended to Sports Illustrated magazine to become its senior writer covering football.

After two World Series wins in the last decade, the Red Sox have become a very rich and very powerful team, and, of course, they have been corrupted by it. Now, in addition to high-minded scrutiny, there is the low-brow demand to keep winning every year. Theo Epstein, the former general manager of the Red Sox, referred to it as "having to feed the monster."

The low-brow demands of the Fenway fan mob and media, a.k.a. the monster, boiled over in an eruption at the end of last season, when the Red Sox carried out a stunning trade of arguably their three best players, Josh Beckett, Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford. Seemingly acting on a familiar refrain from an angry old timer, "For that kind of money ..." (they actually did) "... trade the bums!" Given the Sox history of trading Babe Ruth away to the Yankees, and the resulting 86-year curse, it bears watching how the Dodgers do this year with the former Red Sox stars.

Certainly the three were among the highest-paid players on the team, even in the league. The Red Sox spent years pursuing Gonzalez, likening him to Ted Williams, and traded away several young prospects to finally acquire him for $154 million in 2011. Josh Beckett led the 2007 World Series team, and continued on through 2012 as the tough, loyal leader of the pitching staff. Carl Crawford signed a 2011 contract with Boston for $142 million after stellar seasons in Tampa Bay.

Yet they had a bad year, or even just a bad month, or an injury.

The Red Sox panicked, and under the pressure of the Monster, broomed all three to Los Angeles, and gave in to the grumbling, heckling and outright disgust that now hounds the team through the media after every loss.

In the stands, there is an unfamiliar quiet, an inattentiveness teetering on boredom - most probably the by-product of losing and pricey tickets that put corporate clients in too many themed chit-chat seats. Fenway Park is now part amusement park. "Oh, what's that on the field, a baseball game?"

Yes, the players make a ridiculous amount of money, but it's relative, and baseball players have always had bad years over the course of a career. No more. Now the Red Sox have the patience of a Steinbrenner. In addition to the big trade, many other players like Kevin Youkilis have been released or fled the team under the excruciating tenure of last season's one-year manager Bobby Valentine.

In 2012 the world did come to an end ... for the Red Sox.

The 2013 Red Sox team is largely unknown to the general public. New, shiny overpaid faces have been hurried in to placate the low-browbeaters, much to the skepticism of high-minded scrutiny - Dan Shaughnessy picks the Red Sox and Yankees to battle it out for last place!

Despite the new manager John Farrell and the new marketing campaign, "What's Broken Can Be Fixed," the Red Sox and perhaps more importantly their fans and media have lost their way. They are too big. It is more like a large impersonal corporation. Powerful, wealthy and intelligent but missing the intangibles.

Terry Francona, the former manager of the Red Sox, cited the tangible of needing to be "all in" as an organization to be the best. Boston will be good. Throwing money at things will do that. But until Red Sox Nation is "all in" it together, the monster will continue to chew up Fenway Park.

November 06, 2012

Mitt Romney isn't so much about ideas per se, he's about the efficiency of ideas. He's not a political animal, but he is a pragmatic animal. He gets criticized for changing his position on policies, and post-debate is widely viewed to have agreed with President Obama on too much, but that's because he's interested in process and efficacy, not ideology.

Sure, Romney has a Web site full of ideas, and a five-point plan, but if he could speak freely (as in the surreptitiously recorded "47 percent'' speech!), he might say that at this point in America's history it's not the policies of government but the management of them that is most important. That it's not the quantity of government, but the quality of it.

Conservatives are agog over the inefficiencies, waste and incompetence in government - too much so - but this is where Mitt connected with them, as an efficiency expert, a businessman. For Romney is not of the Tea Party, Neo-Con and Ronald Reagan world. On policy, he is a traditional old-school Republican from the 1950s, which is to say he is pre-partisan! He even dresses the part.

Romney personifies the ideology of business, and is very much of the economic moment right now, but he probably has not connected enough of the dots necessary to become president. He has, however, ushered in the Ides of Business unto the presidential political spectrum. We are in the age of business, of economics, pragmatism, of digital automation. So the next election will surely bring a Michael Bloomberg or a Bill Gates type to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, to lead the United States of Economics. E pluribus debitum: From many, much debt.

Obama may be transcendent, but time is running out on the government of the United States. Too many competing ideas (lawyers!) and not enough bottom-line accounting (businessmen) have left the U.S. stretched thin at home and around the world, and on the precipice of insolvency. It's not really a matter of ideas anymore but of the effectiveness and efficiency of those ideas.

Many areas of government do a terrific job of delivering services at a very low cost, but ideological partisanship over the past 30 years have created a dire situation in which Democrats and Republicans don't want to admit to compromise with the other side. We are a competitive society after all! So taxes aren't raised, programs aren't cut, and economists increasingly call the national deficit as an existential issue.

Yet political ideology is almost dead. The days of trickle-down government and trickle-down economics are numbered. A freight train filled with cans previously kicked down the road is headed toward a fiscal cliff.

The Ides of Business are upon us, and soon a turnaround specialist, such as Mitt Romney, will take the country through a managed bankruptcy. It will be called something else, though! The reaper will be grim, possibly Chinese, and very painful. There will be tumult. We will try to kill our way out of it, but a different era will begin in America. Ideas will not matter. Executing efficient systems will.

April 04, 2012

The great Red Sox Championship teams of 2004 and 2007 are sadly gone — slowly picked apart by ego over the years, and then finally dismantled in a panicked off-season of finger-pointing. This year the team is so unrecognizable, and so unlikeable, that 100-year-old Fenway Park will be the featured star instead of the spoiled rotten players and diffident management.

The unseasonable spring of 2012 aptly features the highly mislocated personality of Bobby Valentine as the new Red Sox manager. Bobby V! Like a hummingbird seen in March — but worse, a hummingbird with an ego problem — the Machiavellian Valentine is better suited to the brash, outspoken climes and culture from which he came.

Who hired a New Yorker to be the manager of the Boston Red Sox, anyway?

Oh, that’s right, the brash outspoken-and-still-standing president and CEO of Fenway Sports Group, Larry Lucchino, the last ego standing.

Long gone or recently departed are the icons and heroes of an era: Theo Epstein, Terry Francona, Jonathan Papelbon, Jason Varitek, Johnny Damon, Manny Ramirez, Pedro Martinez and many others. They all got paid, they all got rich, and fame tumbled down around them. They were once the Kings of New England, but their egos got the better of the team.

Many of the players grew up poor in America, or very poor in the Dominican Republic, yet, after a few successful seasons in Boston and at a relatively young age, they left the team — in one instance, to make the difference between making $42 million and $50 million. Others stayed, but for a price, specifically an absurd, obscene ticket price. In 2012, after eight years of winning baseball and rising ticket prices, a night at Fenway Park in good seats for a family of four will cost in excess of $1,000.

The average baseball player makes $3 million a year. So what if he can’t eat in public, in peace? David Ortiz has made roughly $84 million in the last eight years, enough to open his own restaurant, Big Papi’s Grill.

As they say in Washington, “That’s your money!”

This increasingly unseemly exchange is about to get much worse in the unseasonable season of 2012. The Red Sox are not projected to do well, and an annoying manager will probably exacerbate their public-relations problems and threaten their profitable sell-out streak.

Although the Red Sox are not a publicly traded company, they are big business, and the players and their big salaries are under a microscope worthy of Wall Street. (If only Wall Street itself were this thoroughly scrutinized!)

There aren’t many windows into the super-rich, and that’s exactly what the Red Sox and their players have become. Most highly paid business executives or rich individuals operate behind walls of secrecy and security, at work and at home. The fortunes of the Red Sox play out daily in the pages of The Providence Journal, and the merciless WEEI sports-radio talk shows, among many other media outlets.

In the end, most of the players cashed in and went their own way because of team success. Greed and ego trumped modesty and honor. There are a few exceptions. Dustin Pedroia, Kevin Youkilis and Jon Lester signed “team” contracts for notably less money, but the Red Sox way, articulated by Theo Epstein, eventually gave way to the free-agent way embodied by the salaries of Adrian Gonzalez ($21 million per year), Carl Crawford ($20 million a year) and John Lackey ($16 million a year).

They are now too big, and will fail.

The fans have the championship memories and costly paraphernalia, and a creeping feeling that it is all so very hollow. These guys did something special together that we were all a part of, but that success led to a thousand roads out of town and away from the team that made it all possible. Again, the individual trumps the collective. America.

October 19, 2011

If it were a hit television show, the Boston Red Sox season just ended with a perfect cliffhanger. You want the drama? You can’t handle the drama! Fenway Park is drowning in drama.

The face of the franchise, David Ortiz, aka Big Papi, says he would prefer to play for the Yankees, because they are a more stable team. Ouch! Terry Francona, the “greatest manager in Red Sox history”, resigned feeling unappreciated. Sniff! And now the brains behind the baseball operations, Theo Epstein, is leaving, as the culmination of a long simmering power struggle against Fenway Sports Group President Larry Lucchino. Woof!

Yes, women still watch soap operas during the day, but men are far worse with their baseball games at night. Red Sox fans of the male variety seemingly call into sports talk- radio shows at all hours for the pleasure of yelling at each other about their opinions. Talk radio? It’s more like yell radio! The sports journalists at WEEI and 98.5 The Sports Hub stir the pot like bad troublemaking trial lawyers. Add in the daily criticism from newspaper, television and on-line reporters, and sports bloggers (that’s a real word now!), and the resulting scrutiny and drama—some call it journalism—are enough to drive a team stark raving mad!

Boston sports journalism has long had a misanthropic reputation, and this latest chapter in the 99- year history of Fenway Park has them perhaps rightfully claiming back their position of power and authority in town. The owners of the Red Sox, John Henry, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino, have built a very successful and first-class business over the past eight years. They acquired other sports properties, in and out of the United States, to try to build a better, stronger overall product, with deep pockets. The better to compete with the Yankees. Yet now they face an even bigger challenge: the wrath of local sports journalists who act like angry union reps for the legion of baseball fans in New England and beyond.

Like any good soap opera, the Red Sox have no real off-season. True, they don’t play baseball games from November through February, but the Hot Stove season of speculation and gossip is already upon us, and it is extra-personal, scurrilous, and scandalous Witness the past two weeks.

New Yorkers are just as bad at losing, but in a much bigger city, the spotlight quickly falls elsewhere. Not so in Boston. The unbearable light of being with the Red Sox eventually seems to get to everybody, and then they have to leave. When will it get to ownership? If and when that happens, New Yorkers will truly celebrate the stunning fall from grace of their chief rival, and still the only team to win the World Series twice in the 21st Century.

April 10, 2011

How much longer can the Red Sox draw 37,000-plus fans to Fenway Park to sit and watch baseball games without offering an interactive digital component as part of the experience?

The next generation of baseball fans, 15 to 24, are highly active two-way participants in their online entertainment and communications. The notion of just sitting and watching something for three hours is beyond antiquated; it’s what only their parents would do!

Mobile computing and digital technologies have wired a new generation, one every bit as sharp-elbowed and opinionated as previous generations of Red Sox fans.

The Red Sox spent a king’s ransom on new players this year to get back to their winning ways, but they will have to cater to young people if they are to continue the longest sellout streak in Major League Baseball history (seven years). Sellout streaks are important in baseball because gate receipts constitute the majority of revenue that each team generates.

Unlike the more egalitarian National Football League, which has a salary cap and whose teams pool their television revenue, Major League Baseball leaves its owners largely on their own to run their businesses as they see fit. Significantly, 65 percent of the Red Sox business ($176 million) is in ticket sales.

Expensive architectural renovations to 99-year-old Fenway Park have been completed, and are nice for the old folks, but for the next Red Sox century, the organization needs an upgrade to the digital experience on the field.

The innovative owners of the Red Sox could start by handing out wireless digital controllers, or mobile devices, to interested season-ticket holders. With the appropriate controllers, or eventually the right software that could be installed in any mobile phone, fans at the game could vote in real time on a whole host of in-game tactics and decisions.

For instance, fans could try to guess what pitch is coming before the pitcher delivers. These votes could be tabulated and displayed in real time on the new $10 million video boards before and after every pitch. Same thing for the batter: Will he swing and miss, take a pitch, bunt or get a hit?

Managing the Red Sox has never been easy; Terry Francona reportedly chews over 70 pieces of gum every game. But imagine if fans could vote their opinions on what they think the manager should do during the game: What pitches he should call for? Should the batter swing, take a pitch or bunt? Should Francona insert a pinch hitter for J.D. Drew?

Perhaps the television audience could be on-line participants also, with their real-time votes pitted against the attending fans’ or simply added to the overall votes. Imagine the bleacher votes versus the loge, first-base grandstand versus third-base grandstand, creating an online digital stadium “wave” for the next generation of baseball fans.

Go ahead and shake your head, but this is the way the culture is going, and it will likely wag the future of professional sports. The secret to the success of “American Idol” and similar shows is live online voting and other interactive features that are everyday tools of the young computerati.

Professional sports and their live events are late to the game. NASCAR provides those in attendance with headphones to listen in on the communications between a driver and pit crew. The NFL has helped develop a Fanvision handheld device that gives the viewer instant replay from multiple angles as well as something called cheerleader cam, which could be useful if the league ever plays again. Meanwhile, your average 13-year-old is doing things with Madden 2011 that make watching an actual game seem like watching grass grow.

The dynamics of the live sporting experience should change dramatically. It’s possible that Red Sox fans could be both more engaged during the game and yet quieter, furiously typing away on their mobile devices with a Fenway App. Baseball has always been a statistics-fueled sport. Real-time interactive computing would advance the sport and keep America’s pastime in step with the new generation of digital Americans.